Based on Doug Crockford’s chapter in Beautiful Code, I wanted to take a crack at implementing Top Down Operator Precedence in Python. After all, Python and JavaScript are quite similar, right?
Not really. As you can imagine, Doug’s code makes great use of JavaScript’s strengths, in this case the ability to assign new methods to any object. For an initial version, I wanted to make the Python version behave the same way, as opposed to a deeper redesign that would be more pythonic. (That would come later.)
My initial approach was a __getattr__ method that consisted simply of return getattr(self.prototype, name). When reattaching a new method to an instance, I needed an extra wrapper, done through a wrap method which consisted of return new.instancemethod(method, self, self.__class__). It would be used like this: obj.method = obj.wrap(some_func).
This caused a subtle problem that took me a while to track down. In JavaScript, any function can reference the built-in this variable, which works whether the function is bound to some specific object or not. (Even global functions are bound to the global object.) But Python doesn’t have such a keyword. The language prefers the explicit, and uses a explicitly passed parameter, called by convention self. The call to wrap a specific function also had the effect of binding the self parameter to that particular object; even if it later became a prototype for some other object. This manifested itself as all kinds of broken behavior. For example, the original code has a global scope object, and every time a new scope was entered, the global pointed to a newer object that kept a reference to the rest of the scope chain. But in the object’s methods, self pointed to something different than the global. Messy.
Before I get into solutions, I’d like to see what readers say. How would you go about implementing prototypical inheritance in Python? And what is a more pythonic way to accomplish the same thing? Comment below. Thanks! -m